How can Financial Advisors better court Millennials? Below are three strategies Financial Advisors can use to reach this non-traditional generation:

1. Change your preconceived notions.

Marketing to millennials in the financial services industry has been a hot topic this past year. Millennials are often written off as lazy, irresponsible and a technology-obsessed generation who aren’t saving their money. A quick search of ‘’Millennials’’ and ‘’retirement’’ shoots off results of how “millennials may never retire’’ or, ‘’millennials are too busy paying off debts to save”. When we think about Millennials, many people have the mindset ‘’when they grow up,’’ but what they miss is that it already happened for a lot of this generation.

In actuality, Millennials are saving more than almost every other age group. According to CNBC, millennials appear to be more sensible with their financial planning than baby boomers and Generation X. According to Wells Fargo, the majority of Millennials (53%) think about their financial future daily. Research conducted by CIBC states that 77% of 25-34 year-olds have started saving for retirement (60% of those 18-24 have as well). Lastly, according to a study by online brokerage TD Ameritrade, Baby Boomers started saving for retirement at age 35. Generation X started at 28. Meanwhile, Generation Y, born in the 1980s and 1990s, began at an average age of 24.

The saving habits of Millennials are actually much better than the perception. It is important for Financial Advisors to change their mindset and recognize that Millennials can be a great-long-term client. This is a first step in reaching this demographic and gaining their trust. In today’s world, there is a lot more onus on individuals to plan their finances sooner, rather than later, and that’s where Advisors come in to help maximize Millennials savings.

2. Adapt how you communicate.

This generation has adopted digital like no other. Millennials are always connected. What are things that Millennials don’t respond to? Voicemails. Letters. Telemarketing calls. Spam texts. In order to more effectively court Millennials, Advisors need to adapt their communication style. Ask your prospect how they would like to be communicated with rather then choosing your preferred method of communication. They are more likely to be engaged if it is a communication channel they use on a daily basis.

On that note, pushy sales people and Millennials are like oil and water. Give Millennials something authentic and useful. Make sure it’s a conversation, and not a pitch. If what you can provide can better Millennials’ lives, or solve a real problem that they have, they will most likely get on board with it.

3. Adapt what you communicate

A large number of millennials have never known a world without the Internet and social media. They aren’t a group that will simply accept your message at face value and take the action you request. Millennials focus on solving real life problems through online research – both in search engines and social media. Financial Advisors need to be relevant and provide solutions online to Millennials’ financial challenges. What really gets Millennials attention is a well-written blog post that speaks directly to them and the challenges that they are facing. Millennials appreciate businesses that make useful information easy to find; answering their questions and doing their homework for them.

Millennials may not be as concerned with retirement right now, so rather then focusing on this subject, focus on goals that Millennials might actually want to save for like travelling, technology or buying a house. Advisors should take the time to understand how they can solve Millennials problems based on what this generation values and from there they will be better equipped to create value to the Millennial, instead of noise.

Advisors can take their existing content and multiply it by turning content and blog posts into different types of content. Repurposing your content puts your content in front of a different audience that may not see you on other marketing channels or through other content formats. In summary, the benefits of content repurposing include:

Extend the reach of your content, ideas, and research.

Focuses on different aspects of the topic or presentation.

Reaches different audiences by offering your content in different formats and publication periods.

The key is to maximize your content and never use your content just once. In part 2, we will look at three more ways in which Advisors can repurpose and reformat their content in order to extend the reach of their content and identify further link-building opportunities:

Webinars

Whether you’re walking your audience through some tips, a process, presentation, or concept, webinars are a great way to present your existing content in an interactive online experience while also building a subscriber base for future content. Holding a webinar is also a great way to introduce yourself and your business, and start building brand awareness. Webinars enable the audience to put a face to your business as well as interact with you through a real time question and answer periods. Not only is a Webinar an effective way to repurpose content, it also helps to build credibility and a more personal connection and trust between yourself and the attendees.

Social Media Posts

Take your blog posts and turn them into small snippets of your content on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, driving them back to the original post on your website. Social media gives you the opportunity to create conversations around your content. For example, if you’ve written an article on retirement planning, you could tweet the question, ‘’How can you balance saving for retirement without sacrificing today’s priorities?’’ with a link to your article. This will not only get people looking at your content, but will also help to drive engagement.

Slide Share/Presentation

Make a list of bullet point takeaways from your blog articles that people would take away from reading it. Perhaps it is the main idea of the post, a statistic or quote, a supporting idea or an actionable tip. You can create a new slide for each bullet point that you listed from your blog post, grab some images for each point, and turn it into an insightful PowerPoint presentation. Speakers will often put their slide decks on SlideShare and the content will do really well for those who couldn’t attend a Webinar, or a speaking event. SlideShare is a slide hosting service that allows users to upload and create slide decks from their PDFs or PowerPoint presentations. SlideShare has a strong online community which will help you to drive traffic from within the community and from search engines. You can also embed your SlideShare presentation into one of your web pages.

Quick tip: How can you get started with repurposing your content? Start by taking an inventory of all of your existing content whether it is a blog article, brochure, pitch book, video, etc. Create a spreadsheet and list all of your existing content and ideas on how this content can be split up or repurposed into a different format.

Has open source software now become the preferred choice for enterprises? According to a Black Duck Software report, over half of all enterprises will utilize or contribute to open source in some manner in 2015.

What was once considered on the fringes of technology circles, reserved for pockets of developers or small businesses, has now become a strong selling point for businesses across all industries. Increasingly, companies as well as individual contributors have opted to implement open source technology into their main system infrastructures.

What would explain the dramatic rise in open source interest? Perhaps we can point to the financial crisis in recent years, which has forced companies to reevaluate their purchasing budgets and operative costs. With greater savings and arguably much higher ROI potential, open source software serves as a more practical choice.

But there are several other good reasons people are gravitating towards the Linux’s and Firefox’s of the world:

More security and reliability

The logic here kinda works backwards: the open source code is available for all eyes to see, which allows users to address more potential issues. (This is kind of like a surveillance society, though in this case it really is for your good.) In fact, hidden code tends to lead to more security vulnerabilities. Open source communities tend to respond more promptly to vulnerabilities, which in turn means a more stable and reliable product.

No vendor lock-in

You don’t have to be stuck using one single software or company to develop a project. For the most part, open source software is compatible with other products that are developed with similar standards, open or closed, regardless of vendor. This means you aren’t limited to using the technologies from the same companies, which could result in expensive purchases of entire product suites or integrations. (In other words, FREEDOM!!!)

Easier to customize and adapt

Open source software adapts to the needs of various users and sites. Certainly, having to modify the source code can be quite costly due to maintenance fees, so developers tend to build a product with baked-in extensibility. The more flexible it is, the easier it is for you to keep up with whatever your site demands.

These reasons, and many others, are contributing to the growth of a vibrant marketplace that is only expected to make room for more challengers and visionaries. And as well-known organizations like NASA, Google and Facebook adopt and invest in open source, you can expect more enterprises to entrust their future projects to open source.

TORONTO, MAY 21st, 2015 / – The Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS) Toronto chapter honoured the Greater Toronto Area’s best public relations (PR) practitioners last night at the annual Achieving Communications Excellence (ACE) Awards Gala. The ACE Awards are synonymous with innovation, skill and excellence, recognizing outstanding work and distinction in the practise of public relations. Attended by over 300 practitioners, the ceremony at Arcadian Court celebrated the accomplishment of PR professionals.

Veriday and Manulife were nominated for ”New Product or Service Launch Campaign of the Year” which recognizes a new product or service launch that generated awareness and product/service recognition through the use of strategic public relations planning and execution. Veriday and Manulife are honoured to have been awarded Silver in this category for the implementation of Digital Agent, a digital marketing platform that has empowered Manulife’s Advisors to take control of building their online presence. Digital Agent has provided Manulife’s Advisors with the flexibility to create their own unique websites with their own content while ensuring it meets Manulife’s branding and compliance standards.

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The Canadian Public Relations Society is a national professional organization focused on establishing and upholding educational and ethical standards in Public Relations. CPRS Toronto is one of the largest local societies with nearly 600 members. For more information, please visit:http://www.cprstoronto.com.

If you are constantly looking for new content ideas and blog topics with which to engage your target audience, you could try digging a little closer to home. What many Advisors don’t realize is that they have valuable, ready-to-use content right at their fingertips. We all know that content marketing can take a considerable amount of time. It isn’t always possible to be pumping out new content on a daily basis. Fortunately, great content can be repurposed into something new and different, and extend your content’s longevity while also maximizing the reach of your content’s idea.

Content repurposing involves taking your work and adapting it to a new content angle or format. Incorporating this approach into content marketing can help to expedite production and increase audience reach and effectiveness. In addition to saving some time on content production, repurposing your content into different formats means being able to focus on different aspects of your content. For example, a blog post may focus on explaining some concepts of a topic, while an Infographic may focus on a different angle of the topic such as stats or data analysis. Some visitors prefer visual over text, while some would choose eBooks over Webinars. Reformatting your content in different formats means appealing to more audiences and extending your reach.

Content repurposing also gives you a second chance at promoting your content and ensures that visitors who missed your content the first time around have a chance of seeing it in round two, or three.

In part 1 of this series, we will cover off three of the ways in which Advisors can repurpose their content in order to get the most mileage out of their content marketing.

Types of Content Repurposing

e-Newsletters

If you are not feeding your content into an e-newsletter, then you’re missing out on a way to save yourself a lot of work, while also extending your content investment along the way. Pushing out your content to your client and prospect list is a content marketing must. E-Newsletters are one of the easiest ways that Advisors can repurpose their content in an effective and easy way in order to engage their audience and drive traffic back to their website.

Advisors can actually send out an e-newsletter full of already existing content. Advisors can provide their content in their e-newsletters in its entirety, or offer a quick summary with a link to the original article on your website in order to drive users to read more. E-Newsletters deliver high quality content right to your clients and prospects inboxes, while also driving traffic to your website.

Infographics

Visual content is not only easier and faster for the human brain to process, but it is also a great way to generate more engagement. An Infographic is a great way to present processes, statistics, and other content that lends itself to more visual presentation. If you have existing content that explains a topic in a step-by-step way, shows a process, or has some interesting statistics and analysis, think about how you can present this content as a visual story.

eBooks

Compile your blog content into an eBook – which is generally an in depth look at a topic. You can create eBooks by compiling all of the blog posts you’ve written about a certain topic and adding additional components such as a cover page, table of contents, images, header and footer. Ebooks are considered to be high-value pieces since they usually include more detail then blog posts. When offering an eBook, you may be able to collect visitor information in exchange for access. Ebooks are a great way for Advisors to collect information from prospects visiting their website.

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For more strategies on how you can repurpose your content, check out part 2 of this series.

http://www.veriday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/speed-indicator-speedometer-tachometer-speedo-47341.jpeg350525Marketing @ Veridayhttp://www.veriday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Veriday-Logo.pngMarketing @ Veriday2015-05-13 13:58:502017-11-14 16:39:18Secrets of Content Marketing: How Advisors Can Get The Most Mileage Out Of Their Content

Website Optimizing is a phrase that describes the techniques and strategies used to effect the visibility of a website or web page in search engine results.

So, why optimize your website? The fact is, if you aren’t optimizing your web pages, you’re ultimately losing business. Optimizing your website properly is crucial to getting your website seen and clicked on in search engines. Your website must be optimized so that your target market can find it, and use it effectively, even if they don’t yet know it exists. Ultimately, optimizing your web pages will increase the quantity and quality of traffic you are getting.

In the Infographic below, courtesy of SurePayroll, you will learn which elements of your web pages you should focus on optimizing, and what you can do to optimize them.

So what do you think of the anatomy of an optimized web page? Let us know on Twitter @VeridayHQ

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We hear it all the time and know it has to be done to achieve better results on Google search. But what is it, and what elements effect its success? There is a science to SEO. The good news is that it is fairly easy to get a basic understanding of what it takes to improve your SEO.

The team over at Search Engine Land have put together the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors to break down SEO and make it seem a little less like rocket-science. In their Infographic below, they include some of the most important ranking factors and best practises that can help your website to rank higher in search engines. It is important to keep in mind that no single factor guarantees top rankings, but many SEO elements working together can increase your website’s chances.

For a comprehensive guide on the SEO pitfalls to avoid during your website (re)design, you can also download our free e-book.